Sunday, March 3, 2013

On the scenic Missisquoi,a debate about federal recognition

I was a daily newspaper journalist for 17 years in northeastern Pennsylvania, so I feel qualified to make statements like this: While reporter Candace Page turned out a solid, in-depth piece on a proposal to protect much of northern Vermont's Missisiquoi River under the federal Wild and Scenic Rivers program, the headline writer at the Burlington Free Press chose the easy way out by using the word "debate." Why is it that every little thing in today's "he said, she said" media circus has to be called a "debate?" Simply put, the National Wild and Scenic Rivers program works and works well. This has been proven by more than 40 years of citizen work and involvement on designated waterways nationwide. I feel particularly focused on this because I had the honor, as a student at Idaho State University in the early 70s, of going door-to-door for U.S. Sen. Frank Church, the father of the Wild and Scenic legislation. In any case, click on this link to read Candace Page's report.
Idaho Rivers United, a conservation club, says: "The Wild
& Scenic Rivers Act protects more than 11,000 miles of 166 rivers in
38 states. Idaho is home to more than 1,000 miles of America's finest
Wild & Scenic rivers, from the famed canyons of the Middle Fork of
the Salmon to the St. Joe in North Idaho. These rivers and their
corridors provide habitats for wildlife and treasured recreational
places for rafters, anglers, campers, cyclists, hikers, and others."

About Me

Alan Gregory is a writer, specializing in natural resource and conservation policies, players and issues with occasional sorties into the realm of politics. He’s also a naturalist, but is not a biologist, having flunked his first college biology course before switching his major to journalism.
He was born in Massachusetts, but his family moved soon after to Oregon, then California and on to New Mexico before landing in Idaho. He’s been hiking forests, bogs and wetlands in his home state as well as New England, the Adirondacks and Pennsylvania, where he hung his shingle since 1989, the year he departed active duty in the U.S. Air Force (only to log 16 more years as a reservist, retiring in 2004 as a lieutenant colonel).
Alan’s been writing a conservation column for a daily newspaper in eastern Pennsylvania for nearly two decades. He’s done volunteer work for a bunch of conservation organizations, including Hawk Mountain Sanctuary in Pennsylvania, The Nature Conservancy and the North Branch Land Trust near his former home of Conyngham, Pa.